Marianne Elliott, who enjoyed a huge hit with War Horse, talks about her
revival of Women Beware Women at the National.

The clever thing you’re supposed to say in interviews when asked to identify your shortcomings is that you care too much, work too hard, are a total perfectionist. Marianne Elliott, who in the past decade has risen to become one of our leading directors, doesn’t wait until the end of her allotted break from rehearsals to confess that she constantly risks overdoing it. It’s a motif throughout her conversation.

“It’s horrendously all or nothing with me,” she confesses, as she curls up on a sofa backstage at the National, where she’s putting the finishing touches to her new revival of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Her pale blue eyes fix me with a slightly pained look and she laughs. “It’s a problem I need to sort out, really. For me, it’s life or death doing plays – there’s this perfectionist thing about me that it has to be brilliant – anything less than that is a failure.”

Strangely, this doesn’t come across as arrant bragging or tactical self-criticism – it’s more like bashful, heart-on-sleeve pondering. As an assessment, it’s borne out by Elliott’s success-studded CV and her painstaking journey into the profession. The daughter of the director Michael Elliott, who co-founded the Royal Exchange in Manchester, and the actress Rosalind Knight, she took an age after Elliott’s death in 1984 to summon the confidence to follow in his footsteps: “I was 28 before I even considered it. There’s an ingrained belief somewhere that I’m not good enough.”

One looks in vain through her credits – which take in the Royal Exchange, Royal Court and the RSC – for examples of a dud, or even for evidence of weak moments within the acclaimed work she’s done. Now 42, her meticulousness, marrying a visionary feel for the big picture with a seamstress’s eye for detail, is everywhere apparent. At the National she has triumphed with War Horse (co-directed with Tom Morris), Pillars of the Community, Thérèse Raquin, Saint Joan, All’s Well That Ends Well and Simon Stephens’ Harper Regan, apparently as at home on the demanding Olivier and Lyttelton stages as in the intimate Cottesloe.

None of the above choices could be described as straightforward – she’s drawn, she says, to difficult work, “outside the usual pattern” – but Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c1621) raises the bar even by her own standards. Set in Renaissance Florence, it demands opulence, decadence, spectacle – a world of poisonous intrigue must be spirited up without letting Middleton’s lavish imagination, which climaxes the evening in a death-riddled masque, tip tragedy into melodrama.

“I’ve not set it in Jacobean times,” Elliott explains in her soft Mancunian lilt. “Middleton was attempting a critique of contemporary London, which was going through enormous changes, shifting from a feudal society to a capitalist one. He couldn’t talk about James I directly, so instead he talked about the Duke of Florence. The problem is that Jacobean to us says dirty, muddy, silly tights – it doesn’t say sophisticated. So I’m going for an imagined idea of Florence, with a bias towards the Fifties, to emphasise that glamour.”

Neither the play’s title, nor its plot – involving the manipulation of two young women by a devious widow called Livia (played in this production by Harriet Walter) – sends out an obvious positive message about the fairer sex. With lines like, “Oh, the deadly snares that women set for women, without pity either to soul or honour!”, it has been branded by some as misogynist.

“I think Middleton is sympathetic to women,” Elliott counters, “yet there’s a contentious point about the play – in that the women are strong, they recognise each other’s pain, but they don’t help each other, which is interesting from a modern perspective.”

It’s not hard to detect a recurrent interest in strong female protagonists. “There is a pattern there,” she agrees.

“I can’t help it, I find women absolutely fascinating!”

Married, with one young daughter (Eve, five), she declares she has no interest in directing Hamlet. “You need to see yourself in what you direct, I think – directing is quite

self-indulgent from that point of view.”

That said, she reckons she’ll only truly enjoy the process of working on Women Beware Women once the whole thing is done and dusted – “I feel satisfied when they’re finished, if they went well.”

Typically, proud as she is of her achievement on War Horse, it remains a worry for her now that it’s a long-runner: “You think – is it still the same quality? Do I need to go and see it every week? Should I be in all the new cast rehearsals? You’re always thinking about trying to keep the quality up.”

Ridiculous? She muses: “Theatre requires a huge amount of energy. So it has to be brilliant, I think. It has to be life-changing. Or what’s the point?”

'Women Beware Women’, which opens at the National Theatre (020 7452 3000) on April 27, is the first production in the Travelex £10 season